Putin’s ‘new elite’: War veterans seek seats in Russia’s parliament

They lead party tickets, star in campaign videos and appear in televised debates. They are Russians who have fought in Ukraine, and they feature prominently in this week’s parliamentary election.

Election officials say nearly 200 candidates have served in Ukraine, while the Kremlin has portrayed them as part of Russia’s “true elite” — an effort to signal that veterans of the four-and-a-half-year war will have an honoured place in civilian life.

But few analysts believe most of these veterans will gain real influence within Russia’s ruling class. They describe the campaign as an effort to encourage more men to volunteer for military service.

Independent Russian media regularly report cases involving returning veterans, including assaults, drunken brawls and killings. Some of those accused of crimes were recruited into the military from prison.

The vote for the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, begins Friday. It is the first parliamentary election since the war began and will also take place in areas of Ukraine that Russia captured and illegally annexed.

The Kremlin is tightly managing the election, seeking to reinforce its narrative of broad public support for the war and provide a veneer of legitimacy for its actions.

Most Kremlin-aligned parties allowed to contest the election have candidates identified as participants in what Moscow calls the “special military operation”, or SVO, in Ukraine.

Veterans take prominent campaign roles

One prominent candidate is Vladislav Golovin, 29, of the ruling United Russia party. He fought in the battle for the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol and lost part of his leg.

Golovin has appeared at events with President Vladimir Putin, who awarded him the title Hero of Russia, the country’s highest honour.

In 2024, Golovin took part in Putin’s “Time of Heroes” programme, which prepares veterans for careers in government. He now heads Young Army, a military-patriotic youth organisation, but has also been placed on Western sanctions lists.

United Russia has several dozen candidates with backgrounds in the Ukraine war. Another prominent candidate is Yevgeny Poddubny, a well-connected state television war correspondent who was wounded by a Ukrainian drone.

The ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party has put forward Alexei Vereshchagin as one of its leading candidates. He is described as having joined the Moscow-backed separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and later led a brigade of volunteers.

“We are the ones our homeland has called upon to fight for the ‘Russian World’, and we will fight,” Vereshchagin, who was born in Kyiv, said in a campaign video, using a term popularised by Putin, particularly after Moscow illegally annexed Crimea in 2014.

Ukrainian police said in March that they were investigating Vereshchagin over alleged home invasions and threats against civilians in the Kyiv region in 2022, before Ukrainian forces retook the area. They posted a photograph of a man they said appeared to be Vereshchagin and said he had fought against Ukraine for more than a decade. He has not publicly commented on the allegations.

Kremlin seeks to entice more men to fight

By promoting veterans during the State Duma campaign, the Kremlin wants to show potential recruits that military service can offer both a sense of purpose and prospects for a career after the war, said Nikolay Petrov, a senior research fellow at the NEST Centre, founded by exiled Russian tycoon and opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

But Russia also “doesn’t know what to do” with veterans returning from the battlefield, Petrov told The Associated Press. He said they are often offered largely insignificant positions with little real power, while the authorities continue to promote people who already held public office.

Former Putin speechwriter-turned-political analyst Abbas Gallyamov described the approach more bluntly as “empty talk”.

To attract more men to the military, authorities need to promise them what they want to hear, from financial incentives to praise and claims about their special role in building a new Russia, Gallyamov told AP.

Difficult road for returning veterans

The postwar transition is difficult for many Russian veterans. Most men who signed military contracts cannot terminate them under Putin’s 2022 “partial mobilisation” decree, while those drafted that year have not yet been demobilised.

Those who suffer severe injuries or reach a certain age can be discharged, while some special units reportedly offer limited tours of duty.

About 167,000 servicemen had returned from Ukraine, presidential administration official Sergei Novikov said in December. Russian media reports and experts, however, say the actual number is likely higher.

Competition for the Time of Heroes programme is also intense. Applicants are required to have higher education and management experience. Of more than 65,000 applicants in 2024-25, only 168 were accepted, according to the programme’s website. About 80 of them were subsequently appointed to positions at national, regional or municipal levels.

Independent Russian news outlet Meduza reported in June that at least 1,300 veterans had been appointed to government positions, elected to local legislatures and councils, or hired by state-backed companies and institutions.

About 850 of those veterans had government or related experience before serving in Ukraine, Meduza reported, concluding that most of the beneficiaries were already part of the ruling class.

AP could not independently verify those findings. However, reports of government officials and lawmakers serving in Ukraine before returning to their civilian careers are common.

Duma deputy Alexei Zhuravlyov, head of the Rodina, or “Homeland”, party, has said he served at the front while retaining his seat as a lawmaker, as some of his colleagues have also done.

He recently criticised a YouTube blogger who questioned why he was not fighting full-time in Ukraine. Zhuravlyov later said he spends “more time on the front line than in the Duma”.

Tambov regional Gov Yevgeny Pervyshov, a United Russia candidate, previously served as mayor of his native Krasnodar and as a Duma lawmaker. He served in Ukraine as part of a special military unit in 2022.

The UK government described his unit in 2024 as having “an unusually high number of United Russia party members and sons of Kremlin VIPs”.

In a post on X, the British Defence Ministry said the unit was predominantly involved in drone operations far from the front, allowing elite political figures “to sidestep usual Russian military service requirements with guaranteed safety”.

After serving for less than a year, Pervyshov was accepted into the Time of Heroes programme. He was later appointed Tambov’s acting governor and elected governor in September 2025.

Disappointment grows over Putin’s ‘new elite’

Ivan Filippov, who studies propaganda and analyses military and pro-war bloggers, said such cases have fuelled disappointment within Russia’s pro-war community.

Supporters were initially enthusiastic about Putin’s promise of a new “elite”, he said, but quickly found that the term did not refer to veterans as a group.

Rather, Filippov said, it included people who had gone to the battlefield once, “fired a howitzer, got their veteran credentials” and then returned to their previous positions.

War hawks now understand that returning troops will face “a difficult life” at home, he said.

“They understand clearly that no one will let them into power,” Filippov told AP.

Novikov, the Kremlin official, said in December that “tens of thousands” of returning veterans remained unemployed, calling the situation a “dangerous risk zone”.

When selecting veterans for positions of influence, Petrov said the Kremlin naturally prefers “rational bureaucrats” who have completed a stint in the armed forces.

“The authorities don’t at all need bandits that come back from there,” he said.